97 pages • 3 hours read
Louise ErdrichTracks
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Weather
Throughout the novel, the weather and the Chippewa people directly symbolize one another. For example, the opening sentence of the novel compares the falling of the snow to the falling of the Chippewa people in death. The Chippewa people see signs and wonders in the movement of the seasons, the forests, the animals around them, and specifically weather events.
Pauline describes the weather before the tornado that flattens the butcher shop after Fleur’s rape, saying “The sky was so low that I felt the weight of it like a door” (27). Such metaphors unite the everyday—a door—with the sky. Similar metaphors appear throughout the novel.
For example, when three of the butcher’s men came to fear and despise Fleur Pillager because of her prowess as a gambler who wins their money night after night, they rape her. Their damaged sense of superiority over the Native peoples and over women cannot let her dominance stand, so they attempt to degrade her, putting her in her “proper,” powerless place.
However, a tornado flattens parts of the town later that night, including the butcher shop, the smokehouse, and the freezer where the gambling men took refuge from the storm. Two of the men die in the freezer, while Dutch James dies slowly as the surgeon removes parts of him piece by frostbitten piece. The tornado—violent weather that enacts retribution for violence done to Fleur—demonstrates Fleur’s connection to nature and her power, particularly her power to destroy her enemies.
Devils
Within the novel there are both Chippewa devils and the Christian devil, or Satan. Pauline reports on both kinds of devils; as her religious mania deepens and her mental illness takes hold, she sees Satan or Lucifer in the natural world around her and specifically in Fleur’s behavior and the world around Fleur.
The lake monster, Misshepeshu, is understood to be a sort of devil, and is blamed for many drownings. Fleur herself drowns in the Matchimanito Lake twice as a young person but survives, so people come to believe that she has tamed the lake monster. While Fleur lives in the house at Matchimanito by the lake, the people assume she controls the monster and even mates with it, and she is blamed for Napoleon Morrissey’s death. Here Pauline describes the lake monster:
Our mothers warn us that we’ll think he’s handsome, for he appears with green eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child’s. But if you fall into his arms, he sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass scales, rings to the touch. You’re fascinated, cannot move. He casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts. He holds you under. Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat brown worm, or a familiar man. He’s made of gold. He’s made of beach moss. He’s a thing of dry foam, a thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive. (11)
Most notably, Pauline reports the gossips’ differing versions of the appearance and behavior of the monster. These conflicting statements lead the reader to believe that the monster cannot be real, unless it is also a shape-shifter, which is not one of the traits associated with Misshepeshu. Like many monsters, he takes form within the imagination of the person speaking of him.
Even Eli Kashpaw believes that Fleur possesses supernatural abilities and a relationship with the lake monster when he sees her walk into the lake and return hours later. He even wishes to believe that Fleur is pregnant with the lake monster’s child. Pauline believes in Fleur’s supernatural abilities and her control of the devil in the lake, but Nanapush does not, despite the many times he witnesses her affecting the weather, as when a brief but strong gale knocks down the oak forest around Fleur’s cabin. Beliefs like Pauline’s make Fleur a larger-than-life character. Is the lake monster real? Is Fleur truly a consort of the devil? Or is she a desperate woman caught up in the fight for her way of life? Readers must decide for themselves.
Medicine
The vastly different ways of healing between the white world and the Chippewa world underline the symbolic differences between the cultures. FChippewa remedies include herbs and emotional/psychological components, including preparation and holding the right mental attitude or specific thoughts. Anyone can perform “medicine” with the right knowledge. Nanapush shares many of his remedies—his medicine—with others, particularly with young people in his role as an elder. For example, he teaches Eli Kashpaw how to court Fleur Pillager and win her love. Many times, the solution to a problem is emotional rather than purely physical. In a later healing ceremony, Nanapush attempts to heal Fleur of her depression.
White medicine, by contrast, does not take the emotional and psychological into consideration. For example, the doctor just keeps cutting off Dutch’s rotten parts as he dies a slow and agonizing death. Surgery and a focus on a physical solution dominates white medicine, just as religion, in particular Catholicism, dominates the spiritual lives of the white people in the novel.
In the traditional Chippewa ways, medicine includes all aspects of a person’s life: physical, emotional, and psychological. This medicine does not concern itself with the moral goodness—in a Christian sense—of a particular action. Traditional medicine concerns itself with the appropriateness of the healing sought, not concerning itself with formalities such as children born out of wedlock, formal marriage ceremonies, or whether a person is a blood relative or taken into a family formed by love and necessity.
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